http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/11/07/opinion/edfield.phpClichy-sous-Bois has the feel of an artificial town, parachuted at bureaucratic behest into the featureless fields northeast of Paris and left there to rot. In the 1960s, planners chose this spot for a "Grand Ensemble" of public housing to lodge workers who came from North and West Africa in droves to do the dirty, boring and dangerous jobs shunned by the native French. Today, isolated from the capital, Clichy is a Lego landscape of bland apartment blocks, their windows broken and concrete walls defaced by graffiti and stained by November drizzle.
Such is the background for the violence that erupted here late last month and spread to other high-immigration towns studding the Paris outskirts. Night after night, rioting youths have torched cars, hurled rocks at police officers and firefighters and wrecked public buildings as politicians run around in a funk.